Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Greenhouse gas emissions were down by 0.7 percent across the industrialized world in 2011, according to a new data analysis by Reuters. The Guardian reports on the leading causes of the drop:

“For the United States, it’s mainly a shift from coal to gas in power plants,” said Steffen Kallbekken, research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, said of the 2011 numbers.
“For Europe it’s primarily weak economic activity,” he said. Industrialised nations are trying to cut emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, to curb a rise in temperatures and avert heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

But the data shows that even though EU economic weakness and US natural gas are responsible for significant drops in emissions in the developed world, developing countries, led by China, continue to drive the global total higher.
This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results. The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.
The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.
But the diverging trends in greenhouse gas emissions won’t help the bureaucrats and cookie pushers in Bonn. The problem is simple. No meaningful climate treaty can get through the US Senate that doesn’t put strict limits on China and the developing world, and China will never voluntarily consent to international restrictions on the speed of its growth (nor will a large group of other developing countries). And Europe no longer has either the money to pay for grand global climate treaties or a way to pressure countries like China.
Under these conditions, some sort of grand bargain is unlikely. In the meantime, fracking continues to make the US greener every day.the-american-interest

Today is Queen’s Day in the Netherlands. It’s also the last day on the job for the reigning monarch, Beatrix, who’s stepping down after having been on the throne since her own mother, Juliana, abdicated in 1980.
I’ve been in every kingdom in Europe, but in none of them, I think it’s fair to say, are the people as enthusiastic about their sovereign as in the Netherlands. Take Queen’s Day itself: it’s the Dutch equivalent to the Fourth of July, but the focus is not on the people and their history but on the head of state, whose birthday it celebrates. Go on a pub crawl in any Dutch town and you’ll encounter – guaranteed – one framed (and, quite frequently, enormous) portrait after another of Beatrix, usually over the bar, sometimes with a big vase of fresh tulips in front of it. One grows accustomed to hearing Brits complaining about the Windsors’ luxurious lifestyles, and in Norway the levels of cynicism about and indifference to the royals is surprisingly high. But don’t ever say a critical word about Beatrix to a Dutchman, unless you want to end up with a bicycle frame wrapped around your neck.
This high level of affection for Beatrix is rather surprising, given the fact that her ride hasn’t always been a smooth one. Start with her 1966 marriage to Claus von Amsberg, who before marrying her was a German diplomat, and, before that, a member of the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht. In a country where the anti-German sentiment engendered by World War II is still palpable to this day – probably higher than anywhere else in Western Europe – the match didn’t go over well, and the wedding day was marked by massive protests.
Then there’s her wealth. Everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth II is rolling in dough, but so is Beatrix. When Forbes claimed in 1999 that Beatrix (who is exempt from taxes) was worth tens of billions of dollars, scandal erupted in the egalitarian Netherlands – not only over the amount but over the secretiveness surrounding the royal estate. (“She’s very, very clever at making sure no one can trace her money,” one expert told the Guardian.) More recent estimates of Beatrix’s wealth have been far lower, but even after reportedly being taken to the cleaners by Bernie Madoff (a claim the palace denied), her family fortune is still said to amount to something in the vicinity of a billion dollars. Last year, with Europe hurting economically, Spain’s King Juan Carlos, who isn’t especially rich and lives modestly, voluntarily returned some of his paycheck to the government; when asked if Beatrix would contemplate doing the same with her annual salary, which is in the million-dollar range (she also receives several million a year to cover expenses, and the 300 employees at her various residences, not counting security personnel, cost Dutch taxpayers about $50 million), her spokespeople replied with a quick, succinct nee. Yet the Dutch people still love her.
Fine. But for anyone who sincerely cares about the Netherlands, the defining day of Beatrix’s reign was November 12, 2004. On November 2, the Dutch movie director, author, and TV personality Theo van Gogh had been slaughtered in open daylight in an Amsterdam street by a Dutch-Moroccan jihadist. The murder was payback for van Gogh’s forthright criticism of the illiberality of Islam. But it was also a warning to Beatrix and her subjects. A knife thrust into van Gogh’s corpse held in place a note by the killer, Mohamed Bouyeri, declaring that, just like van Gogh, America, Europe, and the Netherlands would “go down.” It was a time at which any responsible head of state would have felt compelled to make a powerful symbolic statement about her country’s dedication to its freedoms and its determination not to yield to jihad.
Beatrix failed the test – ignominiously. She turned down the van Gogh family’s invitation to his funeral, saying she had other plans. Many Dutch people longed for her to speak to the nation about the atrocity, but she rejected that idea, too. What she did instead, apparently on the advice of Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen (a loathsome dhimmi of the first order), was to pay a visit to a Moroccan youth center in Amsterdam. There she spoke with a number of young Dutch-Moroccans, made remarks about the equality of all Dutch citizens, and was presented with a gift book about the history of Morocco. (One wonders how familiar these kids were with Dutch history.)
The center was in the city’s Oud-West neighborhood, and if Beatrix insisted on going there, it might at least have been useful had she found some way to bring up the tyrannical domination of Muslim families in that part of town by local religious authorities, who are their rulers in a much realer sense than she’s ever been. She might have expressed some concern about the countless Muslim wives and mothers in the neighborhood who don’t speak Dutch, rarely if ever get out of the house, and don’t even know where their children’s schools are located. She might have tried to acquire insights into the neighborhood’s sky-high levels of crime, unemployment, and welfare dependency. But no: Beatrix didn’t want to address reality. Look, after all, where a determination to face up to reality got van Gogh.
In an open letter addressed to Bouyeri, a group of van Gogh’s friends sarcastically posed as so many perfect dhimmis: “How terrible that everything went as it did. We had no idea that this was such a sensitive issue. We have learned our lesson….Could you soon give us guidelines showing us what are allowed and not allowed to say?…We will make it a point to study your religion to prevent further misunderstandings….That we brought you into such a difficult position is surely our own fault.” Alas, Beatrix, in her interactions with the Dutch-Moroccan youths that day, seemed to be following a script that was very much alone those disgraceful dhimmi lines.
As for Beatrix’s successor – well, let’s just say there’s no reason to dance in the streets. Beatrix’s son Willem-Alexander, who becomes king today, is a colorless dimwit who, in 2007, in an obvious reference to Geert Wilders, criticized politicians who use strong language when speaking of Islam and integration. “Not for nothing,” said the prince, “do we have the saying: ‘Speech is silver, silence is golden.” In other words, a guy who was born into a extremely well-paying job – the only requirement of which is that he keep his nose out of public affairs – was putting down a guy whose job, into which he had been placed by the Dutch electorate, obliges him to speak up. Don’t expect, then, that the new king of the Netherlands will do anything but hinder his most courageous subject’s efforts to rescue their country from disaster.frontpagemag

One of the pictures posted on the Fatah Facebook page glorifying Salam Za’al, who stabbed to death 31-year-old father-of-five Evyatar Borovsky. Photo: Fatah Facebook page as reposted by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

In the wake of the murder of 31-year-old father-of-five Evyatar Borovsky Tuesday by a Palestinian terrorist Tuesday at the Tapuach Junction in Samaria, Fatah has posted pictures of the terrorist and the victim on its Facebook page with wording describing the terrorist as “the hero, the released prisoner, Salam Al-Zaghal.”Salam Za’al, a resident of Tulkarem, had arrived at the junction armed with a knife and stabbed Borovsky as he was waiting at a hitchhiking stop several times in the chest. He then grabbed Borovsky’s handgun and opened fire at a nearby Border Police patrol. He was eventually subdued and taken into custody. Media reports stated that Za’al had been released from an Israeli prison, where he served a three-year sentence for throwing rocks, less than six months ago.
Palestinian Media Watch highlighted text and photos that had accompanied the posts on Fatah’s Facebook page. “A picture of the settler who was killed today at the Al-Za’atara military checkpoint, in south Nablus, by the hero, the released prisoner, Salam As’ad Al-Zaghal from Tulkarem,” the Facebook page administrator wrote next to one of the posted photos. “Peace upon you, on the day of your birth, on the day of your arrest, and on the day you will go free,” another photo caption stated.algemeiner

Over the last few decades, humans achieved one of the most remarkable victories for social justice in the history of the species. The percentage of people who live in extreme poverty — under $1.25 per day — was halved between 1990 and 2010. Average life expectancy globally rose from 56 to 68 years since 1970. And hundreds of millions of desperately poor people went from burning dung and wood for fuel (whose smoke takes two million souls a year) to using electricity, allowing them to enjoy refrigerators, washing machines, and smoke-free stoves.
Of course, all of this new development puts big pressures on the environment. While the transition from wood to coal is overwhelmingly positive for forests, coal-burning is now a major contributor to global warming. The challenge for the twenty-first century is thus to triple global energy demand, so that the world's poorest can enjoy modern living standards, while reducing our carbon emissions from energy production to zero.
For the last 20 years, most everyone who cared about global warming hoped for a binding international treaty abroad, and some combination of carbon pricing, pollution regulations, and renewable energy mandates at home. That approach is now in ruins. In 2010, UN negotiations failed to create a successor to the failed Kyoto treaty. A few months later cap and trade died in the Senate. And two weeks ago, the slow motion collapse of the European Emissions Trading Scheme reached its nadir, with carbon prices, already at historic lows, collapsing after EU leaders refused to tighten the cap on emissions.
What rushed into the vacuum was "climate justice," a movement headed by left-leaning groups like 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. These groups invoke the vulnerability of the poor to climate change, but elide the reality that more energy makes them more resilient. "Huge swaths of the world have been developing over the last three decades at an unprecedented pace and scale," writes political scientist Christopher Foreman in "On Justice Movements," a new article for Breakthrough Journal. "Contemporary demands for climate justice have been, at best, indifferent to these rather remarkable developments and, at worst, openly hostile."
For the climate justice movement, global warming is not to be dealt with by switching to cleaner forms of energy, but rather by returning to a pastoral, renewable-powered, and low-energy society. "Real climate solutions," writes Klein, "are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users…"
Climate change can only be solved by "fixing everything," says McKibben, from how we eat, travel, produce, reproduce, consume, and live. “It’s not an engineering problem," McKibben argued recently in Rolling Stone. "It's a greed problem." Fixing it will require a "new civilizational paradigm," says Klein, "grounded not in dominance over nature, but in respect for natural cycles of renewal."
Climate skeptics are right, Klein cheerily concludes: the Left is using climate change to advance policies they have long wanted. "In short," says Klein, "climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative."
As such, global warming is our most wicked problem. The end of our world is heralded by ideologues with specific solutions already in mind: de-growth, rural living, low-energy consumption, and renewable energies that will supposedly harmonize us with Nature. The response from the Right was all-too predictable. If climate change "supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand," as conservatives decided long ago, then climate change is either not happening or is not much to worry about.
Wicked problems can only be solved if the ideological discourses that give rise to them are disrupted, and that's what political scientist Foreman does brilliantly in "On Justice Movements." If climate justice activists truly cared about poverty and climate change, Foreman notes, they would advocate things like better cook stoves and helping poor nations accelerate the transition from dirtier to cleaner fuels. Instead they make demands that range from the preposterous (eg, de-growth) to the picayune (eg, organic farming).
Once upon a time, social justice was synonymous with equal access to modern amenities — electric lighting so poor children could read at night, refrigerators so milk could be kept on hand, and washing machines to save the hands and backs of women. Malthus was rightly denounced by generations of socialists as a cruel aristocrat who cloaked his elitism in pseudo-science, and claimed that Nature couldn't possibly feed any more hungry months.
Now, at the very moment modern energy arrives for global poor — something a prior generation of socialists would have celebrated and, indeed, demanded — today's leading left-wing leaders advocate a return to energy penury. The loudest advocates of cheap energy for the poor are on the libertarian Right, while The Nation dresses up neo-Malthusianism as revolutionary socialism.
Left-wing politics was once about destabilizing power relations between the West and the Rest. Now, under the sign of climate justice, it's about sustaining them.thebreakthrough

An Arab terrorist armed with a knife stabbed an Israeli at the Tapuach junction in Shomron (Samaria) on Tuesday morning.

Initial reports indicate that the terrorist stabbed the victim, identified as Evyatar Boruvsky, in the upper body, wounding him critically.

The terrorist then grabbed his gun and fired at the Border Police who were stationed in the area. Border Police officers fired back, wounding the perpetrator.

Magen David Adom teams arrived at the scene and tried to revive the 32-year-old Israeli father of five from the Yitzhar, but had to pronounce him dead on the spot.

The Tapuach junction in Samaria has known many attacks. The last one stabbing attack occurred in mid-January, when a terrorist stabbed a 17-year-old-boy near the checkpoint.

A Border Police force chased the attacker and managed to stop him from escaping the scene of the attack. The terrorist, a resident of Ramallah in his 20s, was turned over tosecurity forces for questioning.thejc

Dustin Hoffman sent a recorded congratulations to
the filmmaker of "5 Broken Cameras" for the Muslim Public Affairs Council Gala
on April 27, 2013

Dustin Hoffman did not make it to the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s 22nd
Annual Media Affairs Gala in Los Angeles this past Saturday night. As reported in The Jewish Press, Hoffman was scheduled
to present MPAC’s Media Award to Emad Burnat, the co-director of the Arab
Palestinian propaganda film “5 Broken Cameras.”

That film is riddled with half-truths and full omissions, but because it fits
the standard Hollywood position of “Israel bad, Arab Palestinians good,” its
lack of veracity and documentary standards did not prevent it from being
nominated this year for an Academy Award for “Best Documentary.” At least it
did not win.

But Dustin Hoffman seemed to be an odd choice as the presenter of the award
on behalf of the Muslim Public Affairs Council – he is neither Muslim or Arab,
nor is he Middle Eastern. In fact, the only connection between Hoffman and
either the movie “5 Broken Cameras” or the Arab-Israeli conflict – which is the
topic of the film – is that he is Jewish.

Because Hoffman had – or so the story goes – “contracted a very serious
virus,” he did not show up at the Gala Saturday night. Perhaps someone with an
actual yiddishe kupf advised Hoffman it may not be the best move of his career
to appear in promotional pictures with the MPAC leader, Salam al-Marayati.

That’s because Salam al-Marayati tried to blame the 9/11 attacks on Israel
and has lobbied the U.S. government to remove Hamas, Hezbollah and the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad from its Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Who
knows how pictures of Hoffman at the MPAC Gala might have been used later to
boost the legitimacy of MPAC. “See? Dustin Hoffman – and everyone knows he’s a
Jew! – loves us, we must be good.”

Hoffman’s taped message of congratulations to Burnat was played at the
Gala, and MPAC posted it online. Based on what he says in the brief message,
Hoffman appears to have either watched the movie or at least read what it was
about. It also appears he made no effort to determine whether the film was a
truthful documentary or a mere propaganda film. This is the message Hoffman
sent:

Hello, this is Dustin Hoffman. I’m sorry that illness has made it
impossible for me to be with you tonight, and that I am compelled to speak to
you through this recorded message. I had been looking very forward [SIC] to
being the one who, as a fellow artist, would present the award to Emad Burnat
and “5 Broken Cameras,” a film he co-directed. It was for me a most powerful,
moving and sometimes a very tender film and in it he demonstrates, I think, out
of the texture of his own life experience, in the village of Bi’ilin, that his
is, indeed, a voice of courage and conscience. Courage and conscience – those
are virtues so greatly needed for this troubled and confusing time. Wherever we
find them, they should be embraced and celebrated and that’s why I am so
thrilled that “5 Broken Cameras” and Emad Burnat are being honored – it is so
well deserved. Emad, congratulations, and I hope to see you soon. Thank
you.

Courage and conscience? Actually watching the film and making an effort to
determine its veracity might warrant such weighty words.

But MPAC and Burnat, both of whom were probably disappointed that their
opportunity to have a real live famous Jewish movie star pose for pictures with
them, were not deterred. In fact, they had another Jew on hand to present the
award. Quoting surah 3, ayahs 113-115, MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati
introduced Rabbi Leonard Beerman, to present the award to Burnat.

The 91 year-old Beerman is on the J Street Advisory Council, was on the
rabbinic cabinet of the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace before it merged
with J Street, and in 2009 signed a public letter opposing Israel’s policy in
Gaza, which stated, in part,

As human beings, we are shocked and appalled at the mass destruction
unleashed by the State of Israel against the people of Gaza in its military
operation, following years of Israeli occupation, siege, and deprivation.
As Americans, we protest the carte blanche given Israel by the US
government to pursue a war of “national honor,” “restoring deterrence,”
“destroying Hamas,” and “searing Israel’s military might into the consciousness
of the Gazans.

“My camera is a strong weapon and a strong witness,” Burnat said
upon receiving the award.

“We should tell our stories before others hijack them. I got the idea to make
this film from one of my friends who said ‘Why don’t you make a film about us,
who live here? You know how it is to live under the pressure, under the army,
under the occupation.’

“I did this film from my point of view, from my heart, from my mind. I’m very
happy because the message was sent to the world, and everybody was shocked and
moved by its story.”

No doubt especially shocked were the many members of the Israel Defense
Forces who appear in the film which, they claim, was spliced and edited into
such a distortion of reality that an organization which represents IDF members
and alumni has asked the Israeli Attorney General’s office to bring charges of
slander and incitement against the filmmakers.jewishpress

Haj Amin el-Husseini, better known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, with Nazi SS officers in November 1943. Photo: German Federal Archives.

Nazi Germany’s effort to recruit supporters in the Arab world is attracting new attention among scholars.
With the 70th anniversary of a Palestinian Arab leader’s sabotage of a plan to rescue Jewish children from Europe coming up next month, Israeli scholar Edy Cohen spoke exclusively to JNS.org about his current research on the role of Nazi and Axis propaganda in the Middle East. Cohen, 41, is on the staff of the Israel State Archives.
During the Holocaust years, Haj Amin el-Husseini, better known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived in Berlin, where he recorded pro-Nazi radio broadcasts that were beamed to the Arab world and recruited Bosnian Muslims to join an all-Muslim unit of the SS. Seventy years ago, on May 13, 1943, Husseini caught wind of a plan to permit 4,000 Jewish children, accompanied by 500 adults, to travel to Palestine in exchange for the release of 20,000 German prisoners of war. Both the Germans and the British had agreed to the exchange, but the Germans backed down when the Mufti objected.
The Mufti was the most prominent Arab figure to support the Nazis, but he was not alone. “My research tracks the effort by the Germans, Italians, and Japanese to spread their propaganda and influence in Palestine and various Arab countries,” said Dr. Cohen, who was born and raised in Beirut and immigrated to Israel in 1995. “They worked hard at it and, to a significant extent, they succeeded.” Cohen has been combing through Arabic-language Nazi and Axis leaflets and radio broadcasts that were collected and analyzed by Haganah intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s.
Some of the leaflets found by Cohen feature stark headlines such as “Kill the Jews and the British!” Some were printed on the back of facsimile British pounds or American dollars, so that when they were dropped by German planes over Arab regions of Palestine, they looked like money and immediately attracted attention.
According to Cohen, some of the Arabic-language Nazi propaganda promised that those who attacked Jews would be rewarded by being given “the most beautiful of the Jewish girls” after Palestine’s Jewish community was vanquished. “That sort of language makes one think of the promise that Muslim terrorist leaders today sometimes offer—that those who die while killing Jews will receive seventy virgins in heaven,” Cohen said.
The text of the leaflets and broadcasts were composed by Nazi authors, and then translated into Arabic by members of the Mufti’s entourage in Berlin. Some of the Mufti’s men in Germany were more than writers: several parachuted into Palestine in 1944 with vials of poison that they intended to dump in the Tel Aviv water system. They were intercepted by the British police before they could carry out the attack.
Cohen found an internal memo from British police headquarters in Jerusalem in 1939 reporting, “The Arab population in Palestine are listening to the Berlin Broadcasts in Arabic most attentively, particularly in town and village coffee shops where large crowds gather for the purpose.” The report stated that the “uneducated classes are undoubtedly being influenced” by the Nazi propaganda.
In 1945, the activists known as the Bergson Group successfully lobbied the government of Yugoslavia to indict the Mufti as a war criminal, because of atrocities committed against Allied soldiers and civilians by members of the Bosnian Muslim SS unit, known as “Handschar,” that he helped create. The Yugoslavs never took steps to extradite him, however.
Husseini fled Berlin during the final days of the war but was briefly detained by the French authorities and placed under house arrest in a Paris villa. In response to Arab pressure, the French permitted the Mufti to stage a faux escape, and he found haven in Cairo. Later he moved to Beirut, where he passed away in 1974.
Earlier this year, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas stirred controversy when, in a PA television broadcast, he listed the Mufti’s name among a number of “martyrs and heroes” who have died while fighting Jews or Israelis.
algemeiner

German Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière on Monday cautioned against game-changing "red lines" in Syria's civil war, amid growing evidence that regime forces have used chemical weapons."I support all forms of political pressure but I currently do not see a role for the military," De Maizière told reporters while on a trip to Washington, rejecting "automatic" military action in response to Syria's chemical weapons.
"Efficient military action would be extraordinarily complex and costly," he warned on the sidelines of the 20th anniversary tribute to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US capital.
He appeared to be referring to President Barack Obama's past warnings that Syria's use or movement of chemical weapons would constitute a "red line" that could prompt more direct US intervention in the civil war.
The United States said Thursday for the first time that Syria had likely used chemical weapons on a small scale against rebel forces, but emphasized spy agencies were still not 100 percent sure of the assessment.
Obama on Friday promised a "vigorous investigation" into the reports and renewed his warning that proof of their use would be a "game changer."
De Maizière meanwhile urged Germany's Western allies to conduct a joint inquiry into the alleged use of chemical arms.
"We do not have enough information yet," he said.
De Maizière was due on Tuesday to meet his US counterpart Chuck Hagel for talks which would include Germany's potential purchase of three attack Reaper drones and four ground stations.
Such a purchase will be approved by German authorities in May, Der Spiegel magazine's online edition reported on Tuesday morning. The US Congress apparently gave its approval for the sale on April 10th.
The initial request from Germany for the drones was made at the start of last year. US forces use the Reaper as well as Predator B drones for attacks in Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border.
De Maizière wants to get a basic decision on the purchase before September's general election, the magazine reported, although parliament will not be asked for its approval until afterwards. The Bundeswehr currently uses unarmed Heron 1 drones in Afghanistan, but the agreement for their use runs out in October 2014, the magazine said.
The talks will also cover plans for Afghanistan after the 2014 end of the Nato military mission there. Germany was the first Nato member to sign up for a continued training and advisory mission, and promised up to 800 soldiers. The US has not yet made a commitment.thelocal

By P. David HornikOn Thursday an Israeli warplane shot a drone into the Mediterranean just west of the Haifa shoreline. The drone came from Lebanon, and Israeli media immediately reported that it was sent by Hizballah—even though the prime minister and the IDF spokesman, in their public statements on the incident, made no such claim.
Amos Harel, military analyst for Haaretz, reports that the reason for that omission is probably that it wasn’t Hizballah that sent the plane but, rather, Iran—specifically its Revolutionary Guards contingent in Lebanon.
The UK’s Telegraphreports that “according to Syrian rebels and Israeli intelligence, Tehran has poured Revolutionary Guard soldiers into Syria and Lebanon to support its Shiite allies.” The Revolutionary Guards are also believed to have been behind another drone sent from Lebanon in October. That one entered Israeli airspace and was shot down not far from Israel’s nuclear plant in the Negev.
The Telegraph quotes a “Western diplomat” saying: “The Israeli military command doesn’t treat drones launched from Lebanon lightly, since their goal may be not only taking pictures, but also an assassination of senior officials, military or political.” In fact, at the time Thursday’s drone was spotted, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was flying across northern Israel, and his helicopter had to be grounded until the drone was downed.
What was the drone’s mission? Probably not to hit Netanyahu, since that would be an open act of war and Iran, with its elections upcoming in June and its nuclear program probably not quite yet at the finish line, wouldn’t seek that outcome at this point. Harel speculates that “Iran wished to openly demonstrate its potential ability to damage essential facilities in Israel.”
Some believe those “essential facilities” were, in this instance, Israel’s new natural-gas fields in the Mediterranean. Harel claims the drone’s route suggests otherwise.
In any case, despite ongoing “options on the table” talk from Washington and “Israel has the right to defend itself” talk from Jerusalem, it’s clear that the situation is getting worse rather than better. One would have to imagine Al Qaeda drones flying over the U.S. or along its coast—except that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization while Iran is a country, and Israel is much smaller than the U.S. (one-ninth the size of Nebraska, as Nebraskan defense secretary Chuck Hagel was informed in Israel last week).
If the situation is bad now, with Iran encamped on Israel’s border and able to send drones toward or even into its territory, clearly it would be a lot worse if Iran had nuclear bombs. And indeed top Israeli security experts have been sounding the alarm.
Last week it was former chief of military intelligence Amos Yadlin saying that “for all intents and purposes, Iran has crossed Israel’s red line…in the summer, Iran will be a month or two away from deciding about a bomb.”
And on Monday Ephraim Asculai, a researcher at the think tank Yadlin now heads, the Institute for National Security Studies, wrote that:

Iran has been steadily increasing its efforts to advance its nuclear program. It has established an impressive infrastructure and has produced enough 3.5 percent-enriched uranium, and some 20% enriched uranium, to suffice, if further enriched, for the production of several nuclear explosive devices within a relatively short time.

Also on Monday Uri Heitner, an astute columnist for Israel Hayom, had this to say:

Just as Assad used his chemical weapons, the Iranian regime could use nuclear weapons. Diplomacy and sanctions have played out. Now, only a military operation can prevent it. If Israel is left without an option, it will be forced to do it alone, but we can still hope we don’t reach this point.During his visit to Israel, Obama promised that Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon. Those in his inner circle keep saying that the president is not bluffing. The time has come to put an end to Iran’s game of buying time and to act.

The other alternative is to keep playing games with sanctions and—even more wretchedly—“diplomacy” and court disaster.frontpagemag

Jewish students at a Scottish university managed to hold a charity event despite being forced to find another location at the last minute after anti-Israel activists threatened staff at the original venue.
The annual charity ball organized by the Jewish Society and Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity at St. Andrews University in Fife was scheduled to take place at the St. Andrews Golf Hotel on Friday. On Wednesday, however, the hotel pulled out after staff received threatening phone calls and email from activists linked to the radical fringe group Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) and other anti-Israel groups.
The activists were upset that Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund and Friends of the IDF were to receive money raised by the students, and were planning to protest and disrupt the event. The management of the hotel explained the cancellation on the grounds that they could not guarantee the health and safety of guests and staff.
Joel Salmon, the president of the St. Andrews Jewish Society, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that they had being planned the event for some time and never thought about canceling it.
Late on Thursday, the society and the Jewish fraternity found an alternative venue that they managed to keep secret in order to guarantee the security of guests and prevent any retribution from activists.
Organizers went along with the belief that the event had been cancelled and guests were emailed and told to meet at specific locations, where they were picked up by taxis and taken to the new venue.
“Despite the adverse circumstances of the venue pulling out the day before due to allegedly aggressive phone calls and emails from individuals supporting the SPSC, the Jewish Society was able to secure an alternative venue,” Salmon said, adding that a donor paid for the taxis.
“We have been overwhelmed by the support received from the Jewish community, the university and the local authorities. The fact that the protest was organized by people with little or no connection to St.
Andrews speaks volumes about our town and university, who we are extremely proud of,” he stated.
Salmon described the event as a resounding success and said that organizers raised over five times the amount that had originally been expected, with more donations coming in.
“The St. Andrews Jewish Society will not cave in to intimidation or bullying. We will always protect our members and shall continue to provide events to enrich Jewish life in St Andrews,” Salmon said.
The SPSC declined to comment. jpost

Monday, April 29, 2013

By Andrew RettmanBRUSSELS - A personal attack on German leader Angela Merkel by President Francois Hollande's Socialist party has prompted fierce debate in France.
The attack came in a draft policy paper designed to be published at a party congress in June but leaked on Friday (26 April) in French daily Le Monde.
The 21-page text accused centre-right governments in Europe in general of a laundry list of faults: "cynicism … [putting] markets above people … blind austerity … naivety [on lack of protection for EU companies in an EU-US free trade zone]."
It blamed European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso for showing "an absence of initiative" and said EU foreign policy is "weak."

But it reserved its harshest language for the German leader.
It spoke of the "selfish intransigence of Angela Merkel, who thinks of nothing other than the savings of depositors [in Germany], of the trade balance posted by Berlin and of her electoral future."
It said she is blocking an EU banking union on the "pretext" that it requires an EU treaty change to satisfy German constitutional judges.
It added: "The friendship between France and Germany is not a friendship between France and the European politics of Chancellor Merkel."
Reactions to the paper dominated French headlines over the weekend.
For its part, Germany tried to play down its importance.
Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told Le Monde: "We work very well together. We don't have the feeling that there is a change in [French] policy."
But French centre-right politicians went on the warpath.
Former prime minister and foreign minister Alain Juppe told Le Monde that Hollande has "ruptured confidence with Germany" and left France "completely isolated" on the European stage.
Former education minister Luc Chatel spoke on Twitter of a "drift toward Germanophobia."
France's centre-right EU commissioner, Michel Barnier, tweeted that the attack on Merkel was "foolish."
The French paper of record, Le Figaro, called it "irresponsible." Even the left-leaning paper, Liberation, called it "a dangerous game."
Hollande said nothing.
But the Socialist party's deputy chairman, Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, tried to row back, telling French broadcaster RTL that all references to Merkel will be removed from the text and admitting that some of the language was "a bit violent."
French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also tried to pour oil on troubled water.
He tweeted in French and German that: "We cannot solve Europe's problems without an intense and sincere dialogue between France and Germany."
He also tweeted that: "Franco-German amity is indispensable for giving a new élan to the European project."
But Hollande's junior economy minister, Benoit Hamon, kept up the Merkel-bashing in an interview with the British paper The Observer on Sunday.
He said: "Only Merkel, supported by a few northern countries, believes austerity is working."
He added that "the only economy that is resisting, opposing, vetoing [ideas on how to restore economic growth in Europe] is Germany."euobserver

The Economist’s Buttonwood reports on a conference the magazine organized on Europe.
This extract is worth noting:

Perhaps the most interesting session came at the end, when various European economists debated the way the EU would develop. There was much talk of fiscal union, banking union and so on. But too little attention was paid to whether voters want any of this – in the creditor nations or the debtor nations. It looks remarkably as if the EU elite will once more push through a solution in the hope that voters will approve of it later – rather like the adoption of the euro itself. Mr Mayer talked of the shadow state that already exists with the unelected ECB taking on enormous powers to affect the lives of Europeans and system such as the two pack coming into force which will involve central control of budgets, as the European commission briefing explains:“As part of a common budgetary timeline, euro-area Member States shall submit their draft budgetary plan for the following year to the Commission and the Eurogroup before 15 October, along with the independent macro-economic forecast on which they are based. If the Commission assesses that the draft budgetary plan shows serious non-compliance with the SGP (Stability and Growth Pact), the Commission can require a revised draft budgetary plan. Otherwise it may address an opinion to the Member States concerned, which would also be discussed by the Eurogroup.”
In short, with monetary policy out of the hands of voters (and nation states), fiscal policy will follow. So what will citizens have to vote about? Their right to pass laws is also circumscribed by European treaties. All this is rather disturbing to believers in democracy…

Indeed it is but I don’t think that the EU’s oligarchs—or their political and intellectual cheerleaders—will worry too much about that.
The writer concludes:

[O]ne has to wonder whether the EU is considering the trade-off between democracy and administrative (and economic) efficiency. As I quipped at the end of the day, there has been one successful European superstate – the Roman Empire – and it wasn’t a democracy.

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has called for EU countries to increase co-operation and the pooling of sovereignty in a speech at the Catholic university in Leuven. The 83 year old sociology professor urged member states to agree to “supernational” [supranational] democracy, with current nation states giving up further powers to Brussels.

Supranational democracy is, like vegetarian rib-eye, a contradiction in terms. Habermas is smart enough to know that, and sinister enough not to mind–however much he may try to conceal it.

With just five months to go until Germany’s elections, two opposition parties are putting aside their differences to target a bigger enemy: Angela Merkel. It had looked for some time as if the current three-party center-right coalition (Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union/Free Democrats) was headed for re-election, but three developments are throwing that outcome into doubt.
First, the Free Democrats are sinking and may not get the five percent needed to get into the Bundestag. Second, an anti-euro party has organized itself (although it’s too soon to tell just how far it will go). While all German parties are threatened by these interlopers, the conservative parties will probably be hardest hit.
And now, as the FT reports, the Greens have announced that they intend to form a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD):

During a three-day party congress in Berlin five months before national elections, the Greens positioned themselves to the left of the Social Democrats (SPD) with calls for higher income tax and a property levy on the rich. [...]
Making the first appearance by a Social Democrat leader at a Green congress, Sigmar Gabriel, the party’s national chairman, delivered a passionate plea to the Greens to stop flirting with Ms Merkel’s conservatives….
“There are only two parties in Germany that can tame the financial markets, and that’s you and us,” he told delegates, to loud cheers.

The Greens have moved to the left on economic issues, and both the Greens and the SPD seem to be urging more help for the southern Eurozone countries. This new alliance comes at the expense of a possible coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democrats; the Green parliamentary leader said of the CDU “[w]e are not going to form a coalition with a band of corrupt amigos like that.” With this new coalition pushing for even stronger EU ties and a new anti-EU party shaking things up too, Merkel must be feeling squeezed from both sides.
These elections may be the most important vote in Europe in a generation.the-american-interest

“Italy is dying from fiscal consolidation. Growth policies cannot wait any longer,” he told Italy’s parliament. He said the country is in “very serious” crisis after a decade of stagnation and warned of violent protest if the social malaise deepens.
The grand coalition of Left and Right - the first since the late 1940s - will abolish the hated IMU tax on primary residences, a wealth levy imposed by ex-premier Mario Monti, and push for tax cuts for business and young people to pull the country out of perma-slump. A rise in VAT to 22pc in July may be delayed.
Vice-premier Angelo Alfano - the appointee of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi - said he agreed with every word from “beginning to end”, as the Berlusconi camp claimed “total victory” over the policy agenda.
Mr Letta said Italy would abide by EU budget pledges and but in reality he seems to have broken with the core demands of the EU fiscal compact.
Markets surged as optimism swept the country, with the Milan bourse up 2pc and yields on 10-year Italian bonds falling to 3.94pc, the lowest since 2010.
Yet it is unclear whether the European Central’s Banks bail-out pledge (OMT) to backstop Italy’s debt markets is still in place since it entails strict conditions that must be ratified by a vote in the German parliament. This has yet to be tested.
Mr Letta will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, hoping to persuade her that the EU will lose the consent of the people unless it becomes an “engine of growth” once again.
While he is a passionate pro-European - and called for a “United States of Europe” in his speech - his anti-austerity drive takes the eurozone into uncharted waters.
It comes as France, too, appeared close to breaking ranks with German-imposed policy doctrines. A leaked version of French president Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party’s text openly attacked “German austerity” and the “egoistic intransigence of Mrs Merkel”.
While the text has since been toned down to the “liberal politics of the German Right”, the episode has stunned Berlin and threatens irreparable damage to the Franco-German relationship that anchors the EU Project.
The ground is also shifting in Brussels, where EU employment chief Laszlo Andor called on Monday for a radical change in EU crisis strategy. “If there is no growth, I don’t see how countries can cut their debt levels,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
In a direct attack on Berlin, he said the German practice of “wage dumping” within EMU to gain larger export surpluses “could not be justified”. The surplus states have to changes their policies as well as the crisis states. “Otherwise the currency union will break apart. Cohesion is already half lost,” he said.
Italy is trapped in a Japanese-style depression. The economy has already contracted by 6.9pc since 2008 and is expected to shrink another 1.3pc this year. By then the economy will have shrunk back to levels last seen in 1999.
Debt will reach 130pc of GDP in 2013, ever closer to the danger level for a nation with no sovereign currency or central bank. Italy pushed through drastic fiscal tightening of more than 3pc of GDP last year, even though the budget was already near primary surplus.
Critics say this has proved worse than useless, even on its own terms. The debt ratio jumped seven percentage points of GDP in a single year
as recession eroded the tax base and pushed up unemployment. telegraph

In a development that should give hope to Republicans in the US, Icelandic voters have turned out the Social Democrats who led the country after the financial crisis—and returned to the pro-market parties once widely blamed for the crash. By Sunday afternoon, it looked like the Independence Party and the Progressive Party had together won more than half the votes cast in Saturday’s elections and would together form a coalition government.
The key mobilizing issue seems to have been unhappiness with the economy, and with the fact that many of Iceland’s homeowners have underwater mortgages. The victorious parties promised to cut taxes, end capital controls instituted after the crisis, and encourage foreign investment in the country in order to spur growth.
The Social Democrats’ key issue that left voters cold? Joining the EU. The New York Timesburies the lede a little:

The center-right parties have questioned whether Iceland ought to go ahead with the application to the European Union. The prospect of membership seemed more attractive when Europe looked stable, but the Continent is now mired in its own crisis. The Progressives and Independents have said the negotiations should wait until the country holds a referendum on whether the talks should continue.

The prospect of EU membership used to be something quite desirable. Today, it’s only Balkan basket-cases like Serbia and Bosnia that are bending over backwards to get onto the sinking European ship, while countries with relatively successful recoveries like Iceland are having second thoughts. If the center-right reforms continue Iceland’s recovery, the referendum could prove to be an important tell as to just what kind of club the EU has become.the-american-interest

One in two Germans considers Islam to be a thread. 50 per cent of Germans are also convinced that Islam does not fit in in Germany. 18 per cent of Muslims in Germany and 25 per cent of those polled in Turkey also share this opinion. This is the result of the new "Religionsmonitor" from the Bertelsmann Institute, whose numbers are present exclusively in the "Welt am Sonntag".

It shows: Half of the population do not share the view of former federal president Christian Wulff, that Islam is part of Germany. Also internationally Islam is seen as a threat: 76 per cent of Israelis, 60 per cent of Spanish, 50 per cent of Swiss and 42 per cent of US Americans judge it to be dangerous. But also Judaism is seen by 19 per cent of East and West Germans as a threat.

The doubt about the compatibility of Islam and the western world is sharper in East Germany than West Germany (57 to 49 per cent), although fewer Muslims live there. Older people and those with lower levels of education are inclined more strongly to perceive Islam as a threat.

...Significant differences are also apparent with regards to religious behaviour: 39 per cent of Muslims in Germany think that, in religions questions, only their religion is right. Among Christians it is only 12 per cent. islamversuseurope

AP calls them "German-Iranian dual nationals." In what sense were they German, beyond legal technicalities? What kinship or loyalty did they have to their adopted country? From the looks of this, they were in Germany to aid the Iranian jihad, aided by a non-Muslim whose care was apparently only for the bottom line.More...

Even as Italy is facing high unemployment and a worsening economy, pizzerias are struggling to find locals to make the nation’s signature dish. A report from an Italian business federation cites pizza makers’ long hours and humble pay as the main deterrent; immigrants are stepping up to take the jobs instead.
According to the Telegraph, in the absence of Italian candidates, Egyptians have become the most prolific pizzaioli. “We are good at it because we are prepared to work hard,” an Egyptian pizzeria-owner said. “Italians, in contrast, want a nice comfortable office job where they can work six hours a day, five days a week, in air-conditioning. They’re not prepared to work 10, 12 hours a day.”​ The head of the Italian School for Pizza Makers also praised the new pizza-makers, saying that “not everyone can [make a good pizza], but the Egyptians can.”
One Italian pizzeria-owner explained that Italians’ ”mindset is that being a pizza-maker is humiliating,” especially among young people, who would rather lead more lavish, fashionable lifestyles. “They are not prepared to work for it,” he added.
Italian unemployment is currently at about 12 percent, with youth unemployment at 35 percent.nationalreview

Israel received its fifth Dolphin-Class submarine Monday in an official ceremony in Kiel, Germany.
The CEO of the Ministry of Defense, Major General (Res.) Ehud Shani, the Commander in Chief of the Navy, Rear Admiral Ram Rutberg, joined by additional Israeli and German officials inaugurated the fifth Dolphin-Class submarine with the breaking of a celebratory champagne bottle on the hull of the submarine.INS Rahav is to arrive in Israel within the year. The Dolphin is considered to be one of the most advanced and cutting-edge submarines in the world, and possesses numerous capabilities fit for a large variety of missions.
Israel’s first three Dolphin-class submarines are believed to be some of the most advanced diesel-electric submarines in the world.
Germany donated the first two submarines after the First Gulf War and split the cost of the third with Israel. The fourth was received last year. In March 2012, Israel signed a contract for a sixth submarine, meaning that by the end of the decade the navy will have doubled its fleet.algemeiner

After a ten-round circus in Brussels, on April 19 the quisling regime administering Serbia on behalf of the Empire said it was ready to declare Serbia's rape consensual.

To hear them say it, they did this to "save" the Serbs who remain in the occupied territories (recognized by the Empire as the "Republic of Kosovo") from another pogrom. This is cynicism at its worst, because the "deal" turns those very Serbs over to the tender mercies of the Albanians and NATO - the very parties responsible for the peril of pogrom to begin with.

NATO is supposed to "protect" the Serbs, much as it has "protected" their brethren living in the ghettos elsewhere in the occupied province. Much as it has "protected" them during the actual 2004 pogrom. No, the tanks and bullets of the barricades showdown are more likely to be the NATO response.

Treaties with the Empire aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Whatever "guarantees", safeguards and privileges this "agreement" offers the Serbs on paper will vanish with the first KLA boot on the ground, or the first NATO tank. Just as it happened in 1999, and has been happening ever since.

In recognizing the statehood of "Kosovia," submitting to the EU and Imperial demands, selling out its citizens - both in the occupied territories and the rest of Serbia - the quisling government in Belgrade has trampled the Serbian constitution, and committed high treason.

Whatever legitimacy it could claim to have, it has now lost. Entirely.

As of April 19, 2013, the President and government of Serbia stepped outside the law. On Friday, April 26, the parliament of Serbia did the same.

Labour leader Ed Miliband wants to block the UK Independence Party from having a role in the TV leader's debates, it emerged today.
The Tories were already opposed to the idea of giving UKIP leader Nigel Farage equal status ahead of the 2015 general election.
Labour had thought UKIP would only damage the Tories' election hopes.
But strategists now fear UKIP's 'brand of anti-politics could damage all three main parties i unpredictable ways,' The Guardian reported.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg enjoyed a surge in the polls in the 2010 polls as a relatively unknown figure alongside David Cameron and Gordon Brown.dailymail

Israel has clear evidence of Syrian President Bashar Assad's army using chemical weapons against rebels, a senior diplomatic source said Monday.
The official said the information is known to all intelligence agency, and that there is no doubt the Assad regime had used weapons of mass destruction against opposition forces fighting to topple him.
Israel should be more concerned with the possibility of the chemical weapons leaking to Hezbollah or other terrorist groups in Lebanon, the official said.
He also estimated the civil war is a long-term conflict and will not be resolved quickly.
jpost

By Ben Cohen / JNS.orgOf all the half-truths and misconceptions that mar the American debate over the level of influence exercised by Israel on U.S. Middle East policy, the most irritating has to be the manner in which Israel’s foes ignore the behavior of our Arab and Middle Eastern allies when it comes to confounding America’s national interests in the region.
In recent years, non-Arab Turkey has frequently proved this point. Like Israel, Ankara can count on an active, influential domestic lobby (which arguably includes leading American Jewish organizations, who, for “strategic reasons,” have eagerly aided the Turkish government in derailing attempts by U.S. legislators to recognize the genocide of the Armenians that occurred almost a century ago.) Unlike Israel, though, Turkey’s current leadership prefers to scorn those U.S. imperatives it disagrees with, rather than engage in a diplomatic back-and-forth.
When President Barack Obama visited Israel in March, his attempt to mend relations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was widely regarded as a triumph. Relations between Israel and Turkey have been heavily strained since May 2010, when Israeli naval commandos confronted a seaborne flotilla of Islamist thugs, sponsored by the sinister Islamist “charity,” the IHH, who tried to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza. According to the conventional account of what happened during his trip to Israel, Obama “persuaded” Netanyahu to phone Erdogan, apologize for the loss of life in the flotilla clash, and begin negotiations about paying compensation to the “victims” of Israel’s entirely justifiable action.
Actually, Netanyahu didn’t need much persuading. For one thing, Israeli officials were never happy with the collapse of relations with Turkey, its historic ally. For another, the Israelis calculated that paying compensation was preferable to a continued legal and political battle over the Gaza blockade. Finally, the wily Netanyahu may well have foreseen what has now come to pass: that Erdogan would backtrack and thus put the U.S. in the embarrassing position of having to cajole Turkey while Israel cooperates.
Despite pleas from Secretary of State John Kerry not to do so, Erdogan insists that he will proceed with a visit to Gaza in May. Kerry’s argument is that Erdogan risks endangering the prospect of reconciling Hamas with the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank—a position which, significantly, is shared by the PA, whose representative in Ankara, Nabil Maarouf, explicitly said he would prefer that Erdogan travel to Gaza after reconciliation between the two factions.
Many Turkish analysts believe that Erdogan’s defiance is rooted in domestic concerns. The dangerous blend of Islamism and nationalism that defines Turkish politics today has put Erdogan on the defensive. His failure to prevent the Assad regime in Syria from continuing the slaughter of its own people with weapons both chemical and conventional makes him look weak. He is having a hard time selling the Turkish public on a peace agreement with the restive Kurdish minority, whose suffering is largely ignored by a western press focused on Gaza. And his decision to play ball with Netanyahu triggered an angry response from the families of the flotilla “victims” and from the IHH as well, which slammed Erdogan for negotiating with the Israelis while the Gaza blockade remains in place.
In the same manner as countless Middle Eastern leaders before him, Erdogan figures that going on the offensive on the Palestinian front will win him back some much-needed credibility. According to Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the purpose of Erdogan’s trip is to secure precisely the outcome that the U.S. and the PA fear will be set back—namely, reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.
Speaking with the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Davutoglu said, “If the Palestinians agree, it may be possible [for Erdogan] to go to Gaza with [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas.”
The prospect of visibly brokering an historic deal between Abbas and the Hamas leadership—whose supporters enthusiastically threw Fatah members off rooftops during the 2006 civil war in Gaza—clearly excites the Turkish Prime Minister.
Hurriyet, though, does not share Erdogan’s confidence. “This, however, is the moment when Erdogan must decide if he wants Turkey to be a major player in the Middle East, or appear to be a country that is supporting factionalism among Muslim entities,” the paper editorialized. “…If Turkey wants to regain its influence, it is clear that this will not come about by being a spoiler because of the ruling party’s Islamist sympathies. It will only come about if Turkey is once again an impartial country with open channels to all concerned parties.”
Moreover, Syria may yet derail Erdogan’s Gaza plans. Now that the Obama Administration has confirmed, via a letter sent to Congressional leaders, that Assad’s forces have used the deadly poisonous gas sarin in their assault, the “red line” which Obama has frequently talked about in relation to Syria has finally been crossed. During a visit to Washington, DC, Egeman Bagis, a Turkish official with known pro-western instincts, pleaded with the Obama Administration to prod Russian President Vladmir Putin into ending his unflinching support for Assad. The timing of Erodgan’s snub of Kerry could not, therefore, be more awkward.
Will Erdogan now reappraise the situation in the light of these developments? Only he can answer that. All I will note is that leaders who cultivate personality cults, as Erdogan has certainly done, aren’t exactly known for their ability or readiness to change their minds.algemeiner

The significance of the survey is that it covers the six largest countries in the European Union whose combined populations make up 70 percent of the union. And the news is bad. Really, really bad.
It’s bad in creditor countries like Germany and debtor countries like Spain. The percentages are stunning in Spain, where the negative index tripled, but in the European Union it has entered decisively negative territory reaching nearly 70 percent. And the rise of the UKIP and the attacks on it are symptoms of that.
The only country in the six which hasn’t entered decisively negative territory is newbie Poland. But in the core power nations, the UK, France and Germany; the negatives are well above 50 percent.

José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, said on Tuesday this week the European “dream” was under threat from a “resurgence of populism and nationalism” across the EU. “At a time when so many Europeans are faced with unemployment, uncertainty and growing inequality, a sort of ‘European fatigue’ has set in, coupled with a lack of understanding. Who does what, who decides what, who controls whom and what? And where are we heading to?”

Some of this can be attributed to the general unpopularity of any government when events trend downward. But that unpopularity can be and is being converted into political power.

The rise of the UKIP and the decline of Labour tells the story in the UK. Euroskepticism is gaining a hold on the public imagination which sees nations and governments and peoples stifled by insane regulatory regimes. If the system isn’t keeping people afloat, the mandate to cut themselves loose from it grows.frontpagemag

Sunday, April 28, 2013

By Hans von Spakovsky,John FundLast Thursday, according to Fox News, a jury in Indiana found that “fraud put President Obama and Hillary Clinton on the presidential primary ballot” in the 2008 election. We wrote about the discovery of this fraud in our book, Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.
The mastermind behind the ballot-petition fraud was one Butch Morgan, then the Democratic-party chairman of St. Joseph County. With the help of three other employees of the county board of elections, Morgan faked names and signatures on ballot petitions that qualified Obama and Clinton for the May 6 Democratic primary.
Under Indiana state law, in order to enter the presidential-primary contest, a candidate must have the signatures of 500 registered voters from each of the state’s nine congressional districts. Obama’s petition for the Second Congressional District, which includes St. Joseph County, had 534 signatures. Each petition page had ten voter signatures, and, according to evidence produced by the prosecutors, all the signatures on nine of Obama’s petition pages were forged. Without those 90 fraudulent signatures, Obama would have fallen short of the 500-signature threshold. Had those signatures been challenged when they were submitted, he would not have been on the ballot for the primary.
Thirteen petition pages for Clinton were filled with fake signatures, but because she had submitted 704 signatures, she had enough legitimate signatures to meet the threshold anyway.
The court ruling certainly raises a fascinating “what if” scenario: Would history have been changed if this ballot-petition fraud had been discovered when it occurred? There were 72 delegates at stake in Indiana. Before the May 6 primary, the AP reported that Obama was barely ahead of Clinton, with 1,490 pledged delegates vs. 1,338. Clinton had a slight edge in superdelegate endorsements, 275.5 to Obama’s 258, according to Bloomberg News.
Clinton barely beat Obama in the Indiana primary, garnering 51 percent of the vote. The delegates were split almost evenly, with Clinton receiving 38 and Obama receiving 34. Had Obama been disqualified from the ballot and Clinton had received all 72 delegates, it would have put her within striking distance of the nomination. How would candidate Obama’s grassroots and financial support have been affected if he had been disqualified from the ballot and his campaign enveloped in a fraud scandal caused by local Democratic-party operatives?
Political momentum is a very delicate thing. It’s certainly possible that such a setback for Obama could have changed the outcome of the 2008 Democratic nomination contest. But of course, we will never know. All we do know for sure is that Indiana experienced election fraud committed by party activists that may have affected the 2008 election. But of course, according to some, there is no election fraud in the United States.nationalreview

A Palestinian youth and a European activist were arrested by IDF soldiers near Hebron on Sunday on suspicion that they had been throwing rocks.

According to the IDF, the foreign activist resisted arrest and attempted to grab an officer’s weapon. He also reportedly attacked another IDF soldier before being subdued.

The soldiers were assisting Jewish youths in the area after they were allegedly attacked by Palestinians near a roadblock in the city, according to Maariv.

Hebron is the site of often-violent clashes between Palestinian and foreign activists and IDF soldiers manning checkpoints or patrolling areas in and around the city.

In December 2012, a 17-year-old Palestinian youth was shot dead by a female IDF soldier after he confronted another soldier at a checkpoint near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, brandishing what later turned out to be a toy gun and pointing it at the soldier’s head.timesofisrael

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

"Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth".

Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.

"Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040 but it won’t be as pervasive as in the late 17th century".

Even though pessimists say global cooling will hamper exploration of the Arctic, experts say it won’t. Climate change and the resulting increase in the thickness of the Arctic ice cover pose no obstacles to the extraction of oil and gas on the Arctic shelf. As oil and gas reserves of the Arctic sea shelf are estimated to be billions of tons, countries are demonstrating more interest in the development of the Arctic. Climate change will also have no impact on the Northern Sea Route, which makes it possible to cut trade routes between Europe, Asia and America. Professor Igor Davidenko comments.

"The Northern Sea Route has never opened so early or closed so late over the past 30 years. Last year saw a cargo transit record – more than five million tons. The first Chinese icebreaker sailed along the Northern Sea Route in 2012. China plans it to handle up to 15% of its exports".

As Russia steps up efforts to upgrade its icebreaker fleet, new-generation icebreakers are set to arrive in the years to come. No climate changes will thus be able to impede an increase in shipping traffic via the Northern Sea Route.ruvr.ru

You've seen the Ukip scandals mysteriously breaking one after the other just before the local elections. Let me keep this short and sweet.
A few weeks ago a journalist who works for another newspaper was contacted by someone from CCHQ and asked if he needed any help researching possible links between Ukip and the English Defence League.
Interesting, no?telegraph

A member of Fatah’s central committee recently told a Lebanon TV station that Israel is responsible for 9/11 and that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Europe is the fault of Jews.
Abbas Zaki, who is also a former representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, also told Mayadeen TV that Israelis and Jews “do not abide by the law, they do not belong to the international community, and they do not follow any moral standard of conduct.”
From MEMRI TV:

Abbas Zaki: Many institutions have determined that Israel, in its stupidity, attacked the U.S. administration and was responsible for 9/11, and was greatly involved in it. In Europe, there are attacks on Jews these days. In 2011, there were 522 attacks. In 2012, there were 686 attacks. In other words, they caused an increase.
They do not abide by the law, they do not belong to the international community, and they do not follow any moral standard of conduct. So where does the strength of the Jews and Israel lie? Why does Obama want to change the constitution, and establish a Jewish state for all the Jews in the world? They exploit the weakness of the Arabs. The Arabs are non-existent. Therefore, we should negotiate on the basis of non-surrender, and rise to the challenge…

There is no way to know what tomorrow may bring. There may be floods and there may be hurricanes. There may be muggings and murders. But the one thing we can be sure of is that the parade of sympathetic stories about the Muslim terrorists who bombed the Boston Marathon will continue.
The terrorist propagandists ply their trade with the same relentlessness that terrorists like Tamerlan Tsarnaev ply theirs. They have no sense of right and wrong and no sense of decency either.
And so the paper of record, whose record is that of defending terrorists, is at it again. Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the New York Times ran an op-ed from one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards whining about his hunger strike. After the bombings, it keeps running sympathetic pieces about the bombers.
The latest such piece tries to spin a new narrative that Tamerlan Tsarnaev only turned to terrorism because immigration rules at the Golden Gloves prevented him from competing.
The narrative contradicts much of what we know from other sources. Tamerlan Tsarnaev told his father that he was giving up boxing because he believed it was against Islam. And Tamerlan Tsarnaev had lost an earlier match, though the New York Times insists, based on a quote from his coach, that he really should have won.
And there you go. A perfectly nice Chechen loses a boxing match and then gets shut out from the competition for a year until he gets his citizenship. And then he gets shut out from obtaining citizenship due to domestic violence and terrorism and he has no choice but to turn to terrorism.
The narrative is slimy and dishonest. And it points toward Appeasement Avenue.
The idea is that if you don’t give a Muslim everything he wants, if you don’t bend over backward to provide him with special treatment, he may turn to terrorism. And then you’re responsible for the murders of those he kills.
It’s obscene. It’s self-destructive. It’s liberalism.frontpagemag

The mother of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers spoke with her older son about going to “Palestine.”
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, in a telephone conversation from Russia with her older son Tamerlan, suggested that he go to Palestine during a discussion about jihad, the Associated Press reported. The Russian security service intercepted the phone conversation, according to the news service.
Mother and son reportedly discussed the ideay of Tamerlan going to the Palestinian territories, but he apparently said he didn’t speak the language there.
Russian officials told the FBI in early 2011 that they believed Tamerlan, 26, and his mother were religious extremists. Following what the AP called a “limited inquiry,” the FBI closed the case in June 2011.
Tamerlan traveled to Russia in 2011, spending six months there.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva has denied that she and her sons, Tamerlan and Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, 19, were involved in Islamic terrorism, saying her sons are being framed by United States security officials.
Police say the brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia who had lived in the US for about a decade, carried out the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, which killed three people and wounded more than 260. The brothers later killed a university police officer at MIT.
Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police and Dzhohkar was apprehended by police. He was questioned for two days before he got a lawyer and refused to continue providing information.
Investigators and lawmakers briefed by the FBI have said the Tsarnaev brothers — ethnic Chechens from Russia who had lived in the US for about a decade — were motivated by anger over the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months ago.
Dzhohkar was transferred to a prison medical facility on Friday from Boston’s Beth Israel hospital.
The hospital’s Israeli-trained CEO Kevin Tabb told The Times of Israel in an extensive interview that the hospital had provided treatment for him but that he no longer needed Beth Israel’s level of medical care, and that the hospital was “relieved” he had gone.timesofisrael

No better disguise than that of a protected class who can not be questioned without fear of legal jihadists. via Female impersonator robs liquor store wearing burqa.

BEL AIR, Md. – A burqa-wearing man pretending to be a woman is in police custody after an armed robbery and dramatic police chase Friday afternoon.

Police say around 3 p.m. Harford County Sheriff’s deputies were called to Third Base Liquors on South Fountain Green Road in Bel Air for a report of a robbery. When officers arrived witnesses told them a man wearing a burqa covering his entire face except for his eyes entered the store and asked the clerk about beer.

Police say the man altered his voice to sound like a woman and chose a case of beer. As the clerk leaned over to pick up the beer the fake lady flashed a gun and announced a hold up.

The clerk gave the burqa-wearing female impersonator an undisclosed amount of cash and the robber left the store and jumped into a white SUV.

Police say an alert passerby noticed something strange, copied down the tag number and reported it to authorities.